I’ll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.
By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:
‘An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.’
It’s at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn’t apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
If the universe is a simulation then conciousness could be considered an illusion to those outside the simulation. From an internal perspective it wouldnt be an illusion as it’s the only thing that we experience.
However we have trouble even defining what counciousness is (an oversimplified quote from a philosopher doesn’t cover it) so it seems pointless to make such speculative black and white statements about it.
Consciousness is entirely subjective experience so other people’s perspective on it seems quite irrelevant.
What’s oversimplified about the definition I laid out?